


wild dreams of a new beginning

by Raven (singlecrow)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Five Times, Gen, I write the same story over and over again, M/M, five things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-15
Updated: 2013-08-15
Packaged: 2017-12-23 14:52:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/927808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singlecrow/pseuds/Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Carlos surprised Cecil.</p>
            </blockquote>





	wild dreams of a new beginning

**Author's Note:**

> five things commentfic for soupytwist!

There were the little things, such as how Carlos remembered every individual thing he’d learned or been told and then put them together in logical but surprising and innovative ways, almost as though that were something he did for a living: like how he knew that Cecil liked sweet things, the stickier and more nutritionally worthless the better, and that he sometimes got engrossed in Mayor Winchell's press releases and reports of mysterious creatures in the groundwater and forgot to eat lunch, and so when Cecil opened up one of his files of notes for his show he found packets of Red Vines dropping out, or Reese’s peanut butter cups, or cookies with dark chocolate chunks and sea salt. (Carlos liked salt; it reminded him of the ocean, he said, and in tasting it Cecil tasted something of Carlos himself, an outlying ingredient in the comfortably sweet and familiar and its way, as fundamental as everything he was used to.)

*

And then they had been talking, idly, one night on the porch in the warm evening, and Cecil had been hesitantly remembering something he read years ago in college, something sparse, expressed in poetry. It spoke of water in the desert, and stayed under Cecil's skin. And then it was there, a slim volume on his doorstep, and perhaps it might have been a bigger thing than a little one – the bookstores in town had trouble with non-occult titles and Amazon had trouble with non-integer zip codes – and Cecil read it late into the night, slowly, rocking back and forth, watching the hooded figures drift past the porch, thinking about nothing very much except Carlos and the ocean, and Night Vale under the waves.

*

That evening Cecil talked a little too much about angels, and Pink Floyd was the weather. He took the painkillers he had in the house and walked to the door, with purposeful steps, watching his hands shaking, and he found Carlos in the wet, squelching process of driving his perfect and beautiful knuckles into the secret policeman's mouth, and Cecil didn't have to be re-educated that night, after all.

(Later, that was less surprising; later he came to recognise that look in Carlos's eyes that meant something was about to be differentiated and integrated with violence. Cecil had never been defended like that before; he was a pacifist, still water running deep in him, but there was something small and secretly satisfying about being loved like that, in such full, bruising colour.)

*

The less said about the Annual Parade of the Mysterious Hooded Figures (and, Cecil, you have to understand, Its Possibilities For Scientific Inquiry) the better. Cecil found the cowled cape wadded up in his laundry basket and resolved never to speak of it.

*

But those were all things that happened before the grant funding ran out, and Carlos started getting cell phone reception again, and began wondering aloud how many pizza delivery flyers, threats to cut off his phone service and entreaties to donate to his alumni organisation one small mailbox in northern California could really hold. Cecil is sitting on a front step which belongs to Larry Leroy, out on the edge of town, and he's been sitting there all day so Dana has had to do the show from the dog park, distorted but chipper. Larry has brought him gluten-free pie and Dana has said kind things in her broadcast, and neither of them have mentioned anything about distant oceans, or people with perfect hair.

It's just a little thing. It's a flutter of dust at the horizon, at the far end of the long road while the radio says, _welcome to Night Vale_. There's a long time while the little thing gets bigger and bigger but not quite recognisable, so there's that traitor surprise somewhere in Cecil's chest, beneath his solar plexus, that fades into something warm and glowing, and larger than himself and the space of his body, large enough to encompass oceans. Carlos gets out of the car and says, "I came back."

"I knew you would," Cecil says, and takes his hand, and they walk back into town, under the sky black with coal-dust, with chances of indigo.


End file.
